Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 22, 1994 TAG: 9412220086
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
\ Too bad Ferris Wyms isn't around to enjoy his new-found stature. He lived and died in obscurity, and might have remained unknown if not for his house.
The house wasn't highfalutin, just a log hovel that sat beside Rock Road. It was torn down 60 years ago, about the same time old Ferris passed away.
Nobody gave the site or its former occupant any mind until the Virginia Department of Transportation decided to widen the road. Now Ferris Wyms has his picture in the newspaper, and archeologists are sifting through fragments in his trash heap.
Wyms lived as many black Southerners of his era did, supporting himself and his large family by sharecropping. It's what he left behind that makes his common life extraordinary.
"There's not much written about these folks. Archeology is how you get at them," said Craig Lukezic, a cultural resource planner with VDOT.
The state has spent weeks and about $60,000 literally digging into Wyms' past at the old house site west of Radford. "It's a rare opportunity to breathe some life into a common man," said historian Chuck Downing.
Downing is part of a team from the College of William and Mary investigating Wyms and the house site before it disappears beneath earth-moving equipment.
After a month of digging and mapping the 600-square-foot area - now a cow pasture - new pieces of a forgotten life have emerged.
Wyms was born in Montgomery County during the mid-1850s, probably as a slave. At age 13 he was working as a millhand. He spent many of his 80-plus years as a farm laborer.
He and his wife, Martha, had about eight children. By the time he moved to the tenant house with some of his brood around 1902, Wyms was a middle-aged widower.
His world was small, familiar and thrifty, with children and grandchildren sharing the two-room shack. Wyms never strayed far from western Montgomery County and died with a bank account of $10,000.
The executor of his estate was James Lewis Ingles, the white patrician who owned both the farm where Wyms worked and the house where he lived.
There's an old family story about the two men told by Ingles' grandson, Lewis I. "Bud" Jeffries, that illuminates their relationship.
The men, having grown up together, had an interracial friendship that was heart-felt but hierarchal. Ingles confronted Wyms one day about showing up late for work. "We're going to have a parting of ways if this continues," Ingles admonished. "Where you going?" Wyms replied.
Wyms' life spanned an era of significant social and economic changes. Although his working life was spent on a farm, his sons were employed by the Radford Foundry. A scrip medallion used as payment at the foundry was found by the archeologists.
"You can track the Industrial Revolution in the life of his family," Downing said.
An unknown number of grandchildren lived with Wyms, as the unearthing of children's toys such as jacks, marbles and pieces of jewelry has corroborated. A few descendants still live in the area, all too young to have known Ferris Wyms.
None of the findings are significant by themselves, said Jane Peterson, the dig's site supervisor. Yet the mosaic created by Wyms' artifacts and findings from other sites will clarify a story that's been lost and ignored - how black rural working class families lived, she added.
"There may be some controversy about spending money for this," Downing said. "But I'm a very firm believer that the dismissal of history is a very dangerous habit for a society."
VDOT thought highly enough of the Wyms site to fund the meticulous research. "It's a rare situation," Downing said.
Soon, the new, wider, $4.4 million version of Rock Road will roll over the house site - and a huge, venerable oak tree in the yard. Cars will drive even faster past the overgrown cemetery up the road where Ferris Wyms is buried.
But Wyms, said to be a religious man, has found his own version of life after death.
by CNB